Well ... not exactly the Vegas look - but this was a picture I took just next to the New Delhi railway station. .

I am at Norwich now at my Studio apartment - nice cosy place. It has a couch like the one Joey and Chandler have in F.R.I.E.N.D.S. and I am spending most of my time at home watching Friends on TV, eating and surfing the net!! Proper Couch Potato Eh!! Yeah ... So presented below are some photos of my lunch today (Baked Beans with Onion sprinkled on a bread; the bread is smeared with butter) - tastes amazing - believe you me! And the next photo below that is the Sofas on which I spend most of time sitting and surfing! .

You might be surprised to see the title after the post I made last night. But I am really impressed the way Zapak has reacted to my post. Read on to know more ... When I made the post last night, India was still in deep slumber; and when India woke up - I was in deep slumber. But while I was asleep, the Zapak team woke up to my blog post - they thereafter tracked me through various Social networks and by the time I woke up, I had a couple requests from their team to connect to me. [The earliest one was as early as 7.57 AM India time] I was surprised (and impressed) about the speed with which they contacted me - so I sent out my contact details, and Lo! Within less than an hour I had them calling me explaining that the mail I received was because of some kind of spurious network activity and was a "security issue" which they were dealing with. They requested me to remove the image which I had put up on my blog, because it revealed some internal statistics they were tracking. W

Update : If you are reading this - please also read my follow up post Zapak - a dynamic and proactive Web2.0 company? which is an account of the events which happened after I made this post. Someone at Zapak.com (also ZapakMail) seems to have conjured up the "good idea" of sending out Birthday emails to its members. But as they say - the implementation and not the idea is what creates success - apart from the fact that the email looks like a 1990 word document [and that too hardly like a greeting or newsletter of 1990 but rather looking like some office document] - the email commits the one of the worst faux passes of the internet world. [The Image has been removed] The email [below the part shown above] contains a list of all email ID's who have registered their birthdates for the day! Not only is everyone's email ID being revealed to everyone else, their birthdates are also revealed. For so many people who keep variations of their birthdates as their passwords -

I am at one of my 'old' offices today - as I went to the cafeteria to collect my lunch, I was pleasantly surprised to see the addition of a new counter to the lunch area - Tiffin Bites: Indian curry food. The counter was serving Chhole, some paneer curry and roti & rice along with Indian pickles. Since I am on a brief trip, I decided to rather enjoy the typical British food items which I don't get back home in India - jacket potato & beans, croissants, Delis, Salads (with lots of Mayonnaise on it). But after a moment I realized that not just me, no Indian face (you can find quite a few in London at any place) was found at the Tiffin bites food counter. All of its customers were non-Indian. I'm sure, if it continues like this for another 5 years, the British will find Indian foods in their regular lunch and dinner, ahead of their own traditionals. (It would actually be a bad news for someone like me who would rather enjoy British food in Britain). I have also ob

Sourced from: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/David_Ogilvy When someone is made the head of an office in the Ogilvy & Mather chain, I send him a Matrioshka doll from Gorky. If he has the curiosity to open it, and keep opening it until he comes to the inside of the smallest doll, he finds this message: If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs . But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants . Always hold your sales meetings in rooms too small for the audience, even if it means holding them in the WC. 'Standing room only' creates an atmosphere of success, as in theatres and restaurants, while a half-empty auditorium smells of failure. It has been found that the less an advertisement looks like an advertisement, and the more it looks like an editorial, the more readers stop, look and read. Therefore, study the graphics used by editors and imitate them. Study the graphi

As some of you know, I am in London for a little over a month. Landed here on Saturday (10/05) evening. Strangely enough, as the flight flew over the city, across the Thames, the Tower bridge and the Buckingham Palace - I got a feeling of homecoming ! I felt somehow that this was also one of "my" cities; though I have stayed in London only for 6 months, it definitely felt like home. The same evening, went to Leicester square and barged into Wagamama's - one of my favourite eating places in London and had saien soba . It was great to be in Leicester Square on a Saturday night among the usual crowd and frenzy. Came back by a bus which took me through all the familiar places from Blackfrairs (where my previous office was) to Trafalgar Square, St. Paul's Cathedral .... felt quite nostalgic remembering the times I spent looking around these places for the first time - 'twas then with some NITIE friends who also were in London :-). Sunday was mostly lazy, had fo

A constant debate in India is between public and private sectors - which is better for growth, which is better for social equity and which can propel the nation to the next orbit? Clearly, given the last decade and half's run that the economy has had, private sector has won the debate as far as Industry is concerned. However the debate still continues for public utility services like education and healthcare. Especially with such a large part of the population still to become literate and quality of education being under doubt (even for the private sector in some cases), the pendulum is still oscillating between private and public for the educational sector. While there are several arguments in favour of privatization of education and private education vouchers , the one's against it are not completely unfounded. I quote: The assumption of competition in turn assumes three things: a) that “school choice” is real, b) that it is not possible to cheat the system, and c) that in

MBA's usually learn about Theory X:Theory Y methods of management. Over the last 3 years in corporate world I have seen similar two opposite styles of business development at work - I christen them "Theory A: Theory B" style of business. Theory A A manager who believes that new business is the best business and getting business is his most important priority. Such managers tend to paint a very rosy picture of their company / team / work in front of a new client. They also tend to over-commit. Though not as a rule, but as a corollary, such managers tend to pay very little attention to work (projects / deliverables etc) when its comes to delivery / execution. Thus they tend to over-commit and under perform, resulting in low repeat business. However, their future pipelines are usually so full of work that they are hardly ever bothered or worried by the lack of repeat business. Theory B A manager who believes that repeat business is the best form of business and hence his fo

In this Series: Part I , Part II Today whether you visit Mumbai or Dehradun the same scene awaits you – traffic bursting from the seams, lack of amenities, overcrowded public transport (whether it is the Mumbai local, the tempo in Dehradun or shared-rickshaw in Vadodara). Why has this happened? Clearly, we have never looked at our cities in a scientific and organized fashion, our cities emerged just like other countries, as centres of trade. However, cities which should have evolved gradually underwent destruction and a military set-up was imposed on them. Today are imposing a commercial infrastructure over the same military set-up creating a further confused landscape on one hand and choking the amenities and resources on the other. What can we do to solve these problems? I have few thoughts in mind: Macro level We should de-congest existing cities by shifting out industries from them to newer, better planned cities (for example the way industries were moved from Mumbai to